Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in March 2017
FTP assistant
This month I marked 111 packages for accept and sent four emails to maintainers asking questions. The bad number of the month are the 41 packages I had to reject. This rejection rate was the worst of all my NEW-months.
May I ask everybody to pay a bit more attention before uploading/sponsoring a package?
Debian LTS
This was my thirty-third month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.
This month my all in all workload has been 14.75h. During that time I did uploads of
- [DSA 3798-1] tnef security update for four CVEs
- [DLA 839-2] tnef regression update
- [DSA 3798-2] tnef regression update
- tnef security update in unstable/testing for four CVEs
- [DLA 878-1] libytnef security update for ten CVEs
DRM leasing part deux (kernel side)
I've stabilized the kernel lease implementation so that leases now
work reliably, and don't require a reboot before running the demo app
a second time. Here's whats changed:
Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world (
Welcome to the second post in rambling random R recommendation series, or 
Home office minister Amber Rudd recently suggested British firms should 
All this racism, it's just not cricket. Or is it? One of the most remarkable cricketers to play for England in recent times, 
In fact, after Brexit, people like Venables and Thompson will remain in Britain while 
What does "maximum control" over other human beings mean to you?
The new British PM has said she wants "
Echoes of the Third Reich
Most people associate acts of mass murder with the Germans who lived in the time of Adolf Hitler. These are the stories told over and and over again in movies, books and the press.
Look more closely, however, and it appears that the vast majority of Germans were not in immediate contact with the gas chambers. Even Gobels' secretary writes that 
There is no middle ground between "soft" and "hard" brexit
An important point for British citizens and foreigners in the UK to consider today is that there is no compromise between a "soft" Brexit and a "hard" Brexit. It is one or the other. Anything less (for example, a deal that is "better" for British companies and worse for EU citizens) would imply that the British are a superior species and it is impossible to imagine the EU putting their stamp on such a deal. Anybody from the EU who is trying to make a life in the UK now is playing a game of Russian Roulette - sure, everything might be fine if it morphs into "soft" Brexit, but if Theresa May has her way, at some point in your life, maybe 20 years down the track, you could be rounded up by the gestapo and thrown behind bars for a parking violation. 
Dear lazyweb,
I am trying to get a good way to present the categorization of several cases studied with a fitting graph. I am rating several vulnerabilities / failures according to James Cebula et. al.'s paper, 
At the 
(Note that in the graph above and the graphs that follow, the horizontal axis represents the number of allocator function calls performed)
While I was here, I figured I d check how mozjemalloc performs, and it has a better behavior (although it has more overhead).
What doesn t appear on this graph, though, is that mozjemalloc also tells the OS to drop some pages even if it keeps them mapped (
(It looks like it has better memory usage than mozjemalloc for this use case, but its stats are being thrown off at some point, I ll have to investigate)
Going back to the first graph, let s get a closer look at what the allocations look like when the system bytes number is increasing a lot. The highlights in the following graphs indicate the range the next graph will be showing.
So what we have here is a bunch of small allocations (small enough that they don t seem to move the requested line ; most under 512 bytes, so under normal circumstances, they would be allocated by python, a few between 512 and 2048 bytes), and a few large allocations, one of which triggers a bump in memory use.
What can appear weird at first glance is that we have a large allocation not requiring more system memory, later followed by a smaller one that does. What the allocations actually look like is the following:
(Note this hasn t actually landed on the 
The above picture is the blend of the two communities from foss community and mozilla India. And unless you were there you wouldn t know who is from which community which is what FOSS is all about. But as always I m getting a bit ahead of myself.
Akshat, who works at NCRA as a programmer, the standing guy on the left shared with me in January this year that this year too, we should have two stalls, foss community and mozilla India stalls next to each other. While we had the banners, we were missing stickers and flyers. Funds were and are always an issue and this year too, it would have been emptier if we didn t get some money saved from last year minidebconf 2016 that we had in Mumbai. Our major expenses included printing stickers, stationery and flyers which came to around INR 5000/- and couple of LCD TV monitors which came for around INR 2k/- as rent. All the labour was voluntary in nature, but both me and Akshat easily spending upto 100 hours before the event. Next year, we want to raise to around INR 10-15k so we can buy 1 or 2 LCD monitors and we don t have to think for funds for next couple of years. How will we do that I have no idea atm.
Me and Akshat did all the printing and stationery runs and hence had not been using my lappy for about 3-4 days.
Come to the evening before the event and the laptop would not start. Coincidentally, or not few months or even last at last year s Debconf people had commented on IBM/Lenovo s obsession with proprietary power cords and adaptors. I hadn t given it much thought but when I got no power even after putting it on AC power for 3-4 hours, I looked up on the web and saw that the power cord and power adaptors were all different even in T440 and even that under existing models. In fact I couldn t find mine hence sharing it via pictures below.
I knew/suspected that thinkpads would be rare where I was going, it would be rarer still to find the exact power cord and I was unsure whether it was the power cord at fault or adaptor or whatever goes for SMPS in laptop or memory or motherboard/CPU itself. I did look up the documentation at support.lenovo.com and was surprised at the extensive documentation that Lenovo has for remote troubleshooting.
I did the usual take out the battery, put it back in, twiddle with the little hole in the bottom of the laptop, trying to switch on without the battery on AC mains, trying to switch on with battery power only but nothing worked. Couple of hours had gone by and with a resigned thought went to bed, convincing myself that anyways it s good I am not taking the lappy as it is extra-dusty there and who needs a dead laptop anyways.
Update After the event was over, I did contact Lenovo support and within a week, with one visit from a service engineer, he was able to identify that it was a faulty cable which was at fault and not the the other things which I was afraid of. Another week gone by and lenovo replaced the cable. Going by service standards that I have seen of other companies, Lenovo deserves a gold star here for the prompt service they provided. I probably would end up subscribing to their extended 2-year warranty service when my existing 3 year warranty is about to be over.
Next day, woke up early morning, two students from COEP hostel were volunteering and we made our way to NCRA, Pune University Campus. Ironically, though we were under the impression that we would be the late arrivals, it turned out we were the early birds. 5-10 minutes passed by and soon enough we were joined by 
Our find for the event was Aarti Kashyap who you can see above. She is a third-year student at COEP and one of the rare people who chose to interact with hardware rather than software. From last several years, we had been trying, successfully and unsuccessfully to get more Indian women and girls interested into technology. It is a vicious circle as till a girl/woman doesn t volunteer we are unable to share our knowledge to the extent we can which leads them to not have much interest in FOSS or even technology in general.
While there are groups are 
What had been interesting about the whole journey were the new people who were bringing all their passion and creativity to the fore. From the mozilla community, we had Akshay who is supposed to be a wizard on graphics, animation, editing anything to do with the visual medium. He shared some of the work he had done and also shared a bit about how blender works with people who wanted to learn about that.
Mayur, whom you see in the picture pointing out something about FOSS and this was the culture that we strove to have. I know and love and hate the browser but haven t been able to fathom the recklessness that Mozilla has been doing the last few years, which has just been having one mis-adventure after another.
For instance, 
Someone from the FSF s licencing department posted an official-looking
thing saying they don t believe 
Like 
